Accelerate your business with Azure AI

Data lays the foundation for all advanced analytics and machine learning and forms an integral part of any organisation’s digital transformation.

Artificial Intelligence, Big Data and Machine Learning are all big buzzwords in the IT world and are becoming increasingly important tools that businesses need to be taking advantage of if they’re not already. AI can help to transform and grow your business as the world navigates the next wave of technology.

In a nutshell, the Azure AI platform enables the creation of better applications, advanced data analysis and machine learning capabilities. It allows businesses to reduce costs and save time by automating and optimising standard processes and tasks. Teams can increase their productivity and operate more efficiently, make quicker business decisions based on deliverables from cognitive technologies. Azure AI also allows Power Platform users to uncover insights and automate workflows.

In this blog post we will take a deeper look at how Microsoft are unleashing the power of AI with a modern data strategy that allows organisations to locate, refine and connect data more efficiently and securely than ever. We’ll also address Microsoft’s recent announcement of its transformative AI plans which will make AI-powered tools accessible to more businesses.

Within the Microsoft stack lies a set of applications and tools built to work together to create an end-to-end solution – all utilising Microsoft technology, including Microsoft (Office) 365 and business applications like Dynamics 365. AI within the Microsoft Stack requires specific knowledge in Azure and can be quite complex. Getting your bearings with the frameworks, infrastructure, services, algorithms can be overwhelming, so let’s break down the Microsoft AI platform and how it can help your business get to grips with AI and machine learning.

Microsoft has made jobs such as visual perception, speech recognition, decision-making, machine learning and translation available as a service – meaning you can incorporate these services into your business logic and allow Microsoft to take over for you.

The platform can be split into three parts, Infrastructure, Services and Tools:

AI Infrastructure:

Everything is built on the Azure platform, meaning that you can easily maintain, update and scale solutions. It is worth noting that these services are available as a trial, meaning you can test these solutions and see whether they meet your organisation’s needs, without incurring a significant cost.

AI Compute and AI data both fall within the AI infrastructure. AI Compute is an important component of AI systems that helped to develop more capabilities within modern AI systems and develop further innovation in algorithms. AI Compute includes a range of services to manage your requirements, and AI Data provides tools needed for storage and data accessibility. These components go together, as you cannot analyse large-scale datasets without access to computational power on the same level.

AI Services:

The services available can be broken down into three areas – Cognitive Services, Machine Learning Services and Azure Bot Service. Cognitive Services are visual perception, speech recognition and translation. Machine Learning Services facilitate decision-making capabilities enabling applications to self-learn and auto-correct based on datasets. Azure Bot Service, partnered with Natural Language processing, allows organisations to build bots that integrate with popular applications such as Cortana, Office 365, Skype, Slack, Facebook Messenger and more.

AI Tools:

Forming the bridge between Data and Services, AI Tools is where most of the customised work will be done to bring your organisations’ IT strategy together.

According to Microsoft, Azure AI empowers organisations to easily:

• Utilise machine learning to build predictive models to optimise business processes
• Use advanced vision, speech, and language capabilities to build applications that can deliver enhanced and engaging experiences

Apply knowledge mining to discover latent insights from vast repositories of files.

Microsoft’s latest investment in AI

Exciting news from the world of AI – Microsoft has recently announced that the availability of Azure Open AI service is being expanded and more businesses can apply for access to the ‘most advanced AI models in the world’ as described by Microsoft.

This significant move will help more businesses to utilise AI-powered tools.

The additional availability of Azure OpenAI Service marks an important milestone for Azure customers and will provide businesses and developers with superior AI models at production scale and industry-leading uptime.